Increased competition has challenged telecommunications service providers to continuously offer new and improved services to customers. Fortunately, certain advancements in technology have enabled telecommunications service providers to keep pace with the increasing demands of customers. For example, the integration of an Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) with a public switched telephone network (PSTN) has allowed Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) to provide customers with a variety of enhanced call processing features and telecommunications services beyond those enabled by conventional switching circuits of the PSTN.
Providing enhanced AIN features and services has long been a growing market for telecommunications providers. However, constantly offering new services and features may have a tendency to overwhelm telecommunications customers at times. For example, if upgrading to a new service is burdensome, a telecommunications customer may decide to keep an existing service rather than go through the difficulties of choosing among new services or dealing with complicated upgrading procedures. Accordingly, there exists a need for a user-friendly manner for customers to easily and efficiently manage telecommunications services and features.
Moreover, while the introduction of a new service brings revenue potential, it also brings the potential risk of displacing an existing service that may be an important source of revenue for the telecommunications provider. This risk is due to the unwillingness of customers to pay for multiple services and, in large part, to the inherent limitations of existing AINs. In particular, AINs typically communicate using triggers that define a set of services available to telecommunications customers—that is, each trigger defines a service associated with a particular customer. For example, a termination attempt trigger (TAT) may define a certain service (e.g., call forwarding) to employ for calls terminating at a customer's premises. Such triggers (e.g., TATs), however, are limited on a per-line basis. Namely, each type of trigger is limited to defining only one service available to a particular subscriber. Therefore, AINs typically require an old service to be canceled before a new service can be installed on a customer's line.
Consequently, telecommunications providers are faced with a dilemma when introducing a new service if the new service may cause or force customers to abandon a lucrative existing service. Namely, from a business standpoint, the potential loss in revenue may overshadow the potential benefits of offering the new service. It would be advantageous for telecommunications providers and telecommunications customers alike to enable a new service to be added while keeping an existing service. Accordingly, there exists a need for a manner of allowing multiple services per trigger type.